


Hidden in Plain Sight

by WorryinglyInnocent



Series: Homeward Bound [5]
Category: Lost
Genre: AU, Canon Divergence, Fix-it fic, Gen, Oceanic Six Claire, season five, season four
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 23:22:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13798500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: Continuing theHomeward Boundseries, a canon divergence in which Claire left the island in the season four finale and became part of the Oceanic Six, raising Aaron herself.Almost three years after leaving the island, Claire receives a visit and a message from someone long thought lost, and she realises that she must come to terms with the downward spiral that the Oceanic Six have found themselves in since their rescue.





	Hidden in Plain Sight

About a month before Aaron’s third birthday, things start to go wrong.

Well, that’s not strictly true. Things have been going wrong in very subtle ways for a while now, but Claire just hasn’t wanted to admit it. For the first year or so, everything seemed to be going well. Then Hurley was readmitted to Santa Rosa and Claire lost regular contact with him. She still calls, but their conversations are more strained now; they no longer keep her up half the night chatting about everything and nothing. Hurley tells her that he’s been seeing dead people, that Charlie has been appearing to him, giving him messages. Claire doesn’t want to hear about it; it’s too painful to think of. At least he’s happy in the institute and feels safe there, but it pains Claire to think that her friend is suffering like this.

Sun has dropped off the radar; she’s the one that Claire has the most contact with as they’re both mothers and they have shared experience that they can talk about, but even then, she’s been busy with her father’s company and pursuing interests of her own. A couple of times she’s talked about Ben Linus and Charles Widmore, and Claire doesn’t really want to know what’s going on in her mind or what she’s planning, because it’s becoming ever clearer that Sun is planning something, and Claire shrinks away from it.

Kate ended up back in custody in the end, during her trial, ten months of it going through everything she had done with a fine tooth comb, checks and balances stacked up against her and in her favour. She’s only out because of Jack’s testimony. Claire testified as well, but she couldn’t, wouldn’t make the trip to Los Angeles. There was no way on earth that she was flying the Sydney-LA route again after what had happened last time, and she had Aaron to think of. They put her on the stand via video link, and even though she was sitting in front of a computer at a lawyer’s office, thousands of miles away from where the trial was actually taking place, it was still a stressful experience. She gave her testimony to Kate’s character as best she could, telling the jury how she’d delivered Aaron and helped take such good care of him, but ultimately it was Jack who saved her. They were together for a while; Claire remembers a text received at stupid o’clock in the morning telling her that Kate was engaged and so very happy, but that happiness lasted only a few weeks before the rug was pulled out from under her feet, Jack leaving and starting his own downward spiral.

Claire wonders when her time will come, when the happy life that she has built with Aaron will come crashing down around her. Hurley keeps telling her that the island wants them to go back, it’s not done with them yet, but Claire shakes her head. She’s done with the island. When she looks at what it cost them, she can’t think of any good reason why she would want to return only to experience more heartbreak.

Her fear, she thinks, is returning, in a hundred different subtle ways. She lives her everyday life, she takes Aaron to playdates and the park, she talks to her mother almost every day, but it still feels like there is something in her life that is missing. The Oceanic Six is falling apart, and Claire doesn’t know how to hold them together. That was never her role. She was never a leader; that was Jack, she was never a motivator, that was Hurley. Hurley had said that she was the heart of the survivors; she was the one that he told Sawyer to befriend when he needed to get back in their good books.

Maybe if she had made more of an effort to remain their heart, they would not have come apart as much as they have, but in reality, Claire thinks that the island itself is to blame. She can’t be the heart of the survivors when so many of them have died and so many more are unaccounted for.

She pushes all thoughts of the island from her mind and tries not to dwell on Hurley’s words. She’s not going back. She can’t. It’s already put her through too much pain.

It’s a hot, bright October day when she gets the visit. Although she’s completely thrown for six by Locke’s sudden appearance in her life when she was fairly sure she’d left him on an island that had vanished from view, his fate unknown, there’s a very small part of her that is not entirely surprised. She’s just on her way home from the store with Aaron when she sees him on the street outside her home. Waiting for her, watching for her. She stops short, and a part of her wants to run three miles in the opposite direction, away from the memories of the island that he’s dragging up, away from the questions she’ll have to ask about how he’s here, where are the others, what happened to Sawyer and Juliet and Miles. She clutches Aaron’s hand a little tighter and he looks up at her.

“Mummy? Who is he?”

He’s pointing to Locke, and it’s almost as if he recognises the man, despite not having seen him for nigh on three years, since he was just a baby.

Claire wants to lie, but she knows that whatever reason Locke has tracked her down for, she’s going to have to hear him out.

She doesn’t answer Aaron’s question straight away and crosses the street towards Locke, her chin up and her stance, she hopes, brokering no nonsense. He smiles as she approaches, a genuine smile that shows he really is happy to see her, no matter what hidden agenda he might have brought with him. Claire wants to accuse, to be suspicious, and she is, given everything that he had done whilst on the island.

“Hello John. Forgive me for being surprised to see you.”

“Yeah, I can forgive you for that. Hey Aaron. You’ve grown. You were just a babe in your mother’s arms when I saw you last.”

Aaron shuffles behind Claire’s legs and peers out. “Your leg’s hurt,” he says, eyeing the plaster cast.

“Yeah, I had a hard landing.”

“Aaron, this is John. He’s one of Mummy’s old…” She doesn’t know whether to call him a friend or not, was that ever really the extent of their interaction? ‘Acquaintance’ is too long a word for Aaron yet, and ‘person I survived a plane crash with’ will go over his head and complicate an already too complicated lie. “Mummy knew him when you were very little.” She pauses, and an unusually fond memory of her time on the island resurfaces. “He made your first cradle.”

Aaron still looks at Locke with unease. “I have a big boy’s bed now.”

Locke laughs. “I’m sure you do.”

Claire nods to her house. “Come on in, John. I’m sure you’re here for a reason.”

Once they’re inside and Claire is making tea having got Aaron a cup of juice, she sends him off to play in the living room whilst she and Locke talk in the kitchen. She sits down at the table, spreading her hands out over the surface, organising her thoughts and trying to work out which question would be the best one to ask first. She decides to go for chronological order.

“How did you get off the island, John?”

For a moment, he looks hesitant, as if he wants to tell her that it’s not important and he’s here for bigger problems than that, but then he regales the tale. If Claire hadn’t spent time on the island and didn’t know the strange ways in which it worked, she’d say that his tale of frozen donkey wheels and the island shifting through time to be something out of the mind of a madman, but she knows it’s all true. He assures her that Sawyer, Juliet and the others were fine when he left them, but he doesn’t know what time period they’re in, which lessens the reassurance a little.

Finally, it’s time to ask the question that she doesn’t want to ask but knows that she has to.

“Why are you here, John? I’m not naive enough to think that it’s just a social call.”

“We have to go back to the island, Claire,” he says. “All of us who left, we have to go back there.”

Claire just stares at him. She’d feared hearing something along those lines, along the same lines that Hurley has always been afraid of, that the island is calling to them, drawing them back.

“For the love of God, John, _why?_ We did all we could to get off the island! People died to get us off that island, and now you say we all have to go back? You left to round us all up and take us back, for what, to fulfil some kind of ancient prophecy?”

“I guess you could see it like that,” Locke says. “The island needs us. All of us. You were brought there for a reason and you shouldn’t have left.”

Claire narrows her eyes. “You’re on thin ice, John,” she says. “Tread carefully.”

“The island needs us,” he repeats. “And I think, although you don’t want to admit it, you need the island, too.”

Claire pushes her hands against the table until the muscles in her upper arms burn with the pressure, resisting the urge to slap him around the face.

“No,” she says. “I’m not going back. And if you think I’m taking Aaron back, then you’re completely mad.”

Locke doesn’t look at her, he just looks over her shoulder towards Aaron in the other room, playing obliviously.

“No, you’re right,” he says. “Aaron shouldn’t go back.”

“And since I’m his mother and we belong together, I’m not going back either,” Claire snaps. “How are we supposed to get back to the island anyway? Another plane crash with hundreds of casualties in the pacific?”

Locke seems a little unsure at this. “There’s a way.”

“I’m not interested in hearing it,” Claire says. After a few minutes of tense silence, she feels her stance soften. “Listen, John, I’m glad to see that you’re off the island and you’re ok, broken leg notwithstanding, and it was really sweet of you to come and look me and Aaron up, but we’re not going back to the island. We have a good life here, a nice, happy, quiet life, which after the island is a blessing. I’m not going to give that up. I’m not going to endanger this life for Aaron. I’m sorry, but you can’t ask me to do that.”

Locke nods, almost accepting, and they fall into silence. He thanks her for the tea and makes to leave the house, but on the driveway, heading out towards the car and the silent, enigmatic driver, he speaks again.

“You’re hiding, Claire.”

Claire shakes her head.

“Goodbye, John.”

She watches him leave, waiting until she can no longer see or hear the car before going back inside. Aaron is waiting for her, patient and questioning.

“Is he coming back?” he asks. Claire shakes her head.

“No sweetie, I don’t think so. He just wanted to talk to Mummy about things that happened a long time ago.”

Aaron goes back to his toys happily, and Claire watches him, unseeing, as she thinks about Locke’s words.

Maybe she is hiding, putting her head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge how all the bonds between them are falling apart and there’s nothing she can do to fix them. She knows that there’s something missing in her life, a void born of the need for secrecy and the lies that she cannot untell for fear of risking the lives of the others on the island. So many times, she wishes that she could just put all the memories and the lingering doubts and worries away, and continue with her life as if it had never happened. But if it had never happened then she wouldn’t have Aaron, and she could never regret him for the world.

She wonders if he will have any luck with the rest of them. Sun, she knows, will say no. Not after what happened to Jin. If she goes back then his death will all have been for nothing. Claire feels the same about Charlie. They owe it to the dead to keep living.

Hurley will say no. She can tell how agitated he’s been about the foreboding feeling that they need to go back, and she can only wonder and dread what will happen if and when Locke visits him to reaffirm what Hurley has already, to his distress, figured out.

Kate and Jack she’s not so sure about. Perhaps before they would have said no too, having a good life together and getting married and starting afresh. Now though… It was the island that brought them together in the first place and began the relationship that has suffered so many ups and downs over the years. Maybe going back could be what salvages them, but at what cost?

The Oceanic Six are falling apart, and in the back of her mind, Claire thinks that the island knows it.

 


End file.
